Gresham College provides outstanding educational talks and videos for the public free of charge. There are over 2,500 videos available on our website. Your support will help us to encourage people's love of learning for many years to come.
This lecture will explore Napoleon‘s life through his interactions with the natural world and a series of gardens that were important to him during the rise and fall of his power. The point of doing this is to approach his life from oblique angles, exploring material that is often overlooked.
Despite the controversy, evolution was widely accepted by many naturalists within a few years of the Origin’s appearance. An important reason for this rapid triumph was Darwin’s botanical works. Seen through evolutionary eyes, plants proved to be mobile, carnivorous, sensitive – even crafty.
This lecture examines the work of Hugo de Vries, a Dutch botanist who was one of the first to claim that science would allow plants and animals to be designed to order.
Sydney’s botanic garden, founded in the early nineteenth century, was expected to ship new plants 'home' to the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, from where they could be transplanted to other colonial gardens, to see if they could become valuable new crops to enrich the British Empire.
This lecture reports on the findings of "The Independent Tribunal into Forced Organ Harvesting from Prisoners of Conscience in China" (June 2019), which examined reports of state-sponsored murder for the harvesting and sale of organs.
This lecture will begin with Bacon’s imagined garden, then consider the long-term promise of the experimental or scientific garden, which would eventually lead to today’s biotechnologies.
The volcanic processes that transport diamonds to the Earth’s surface and enrich copper beneath volcanoes, show how volcanoes can be a major energy and resource.
We will need an aggressive strategy to ensure the safety of agricultural yields and food in the future especially in drought- prone and even temperate zones.